Can Enteprise 2.0 Coexist with Compliance Requirements?

I spent the day Friday at the EMC Content Management Writers' Summit an event held by EMC at the Nine Zero Hotel in Boston. The event took a high-level look at some of the issues facing content management moving forward. (of course with an emphasis on the EMC-Documentum platform). I'll be submitting a news story describing the event to the EContent Magazine web site later today

One discussion item that came up was Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 content and how some enterprise IT departments will need to monitor and control that content moving forward for compliance purposes--much as they have learned to monitor other forms of electronic communication such as email and instant messaging. It seems that even as content management vendors begin to incorporate Enterprise 2.0 tools into the ECM platform, old use cases like compliance are still very much in play.

As companies face growing user-generated content and activities across a variety of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so forth, it takes time for the enterprise (and government regulators for that matter) to catch up and figure out how to set up these tools with the monitoring and control some companies need while balancing the need for employees, suppliers, customers, consultants and other interested parties to interact and collaborate openly, activities which should in the long run benefit the organization.

It's a quandary that enterprise IT departments face moving forward as more employees want to make use of Enterprise 2.0 and social networking tools in the workplace. One thing's for sure, no organization can  ignore these tools and it's counter-productive to try to control them too tightly. Those organizations that require control for compliance purposes will have to learn how to take advantage of the power of these tools while limiting legal exposure. No easy balancing act I'm sure.

Comments

[bill Ives]

Ron _ you raise good points. Central Desktop has just introduced a set of security issues to address the compliance issue. I will be posting about it soon on the AppGap, Bill